Category Astronomy/Space

1. The SwRI-led Juno mission discovered that Jupiter’s signature bands disappear near its poles. This JunoCam image, processed by citizen scientist Bruce Lemons, show a chaotic scene of swirling storms up to the size of Mars against a bluish backdrop.
Credit Line: Image Courtesy of NASA/SwRI
2. The SwRI-led UVS spectrograph images Jupiter’s massive auroras. Collected during Juno’s third orbit around the gas giant, this false-color image is inset with an image of Earth’s south pole aurora, approximately to scale, collected September 11, 2005. The streaky colors away from the Jovian auroral region are associated with penetrating electrons.

King of the planets even more exotic than expected. NASA’s Juno mission, led by Southwest Research Institute’s Dr...

This is an artist’s impression of a quasar and neighboring merging galaxy. The galaxies observed by the team are so distant that no detailed images are possible at present. This combination of images of nearby counterparts gives an impression of how they might look in more detail.
Credit: The image was created by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy using material from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

A team of astronomers has discovered a new kind of galaxy which, although extremely old – formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang – creates stars more than a hundred times faster than our own Milky Way. The team’s discovery could help solve a cosmic puzzle – a mysterious population of surprisingly massive galaxies from when the universe was only about 10% of its current age...

Sequence showing two white dwarfs spiraling into one another, merging and then exploding as a supernova. As they spiral around each other, they emit gravitational waves causing them to grow ever closer. Credit: GSFC/Dana Berry.

A team of international astrophysicists led by ANU has shown how most of the antimatter in the Milky Way forms. Antimatter is material composed of the antiparticle partners of ordinary matter – when antimatter meets with matter, they quickly annihilate each other to form a burst of energy in the form of gamma-rays. Scientists have known since the early 1970s that the inner parts of the Milky Way galaxy are a strong source of gamma-rays, indicating the existence of antimatter, but there had been no settled view on where the antimatter came from.

ANU researcher Dr R...

This is the ASKAP telescope in Western Australia. Credit: CSIRO

A CSIRO telescope in W. Australia has found its first ‘fast radio burst’ from space after less than 4 days of searching. The discovery came so quickly that the telescope, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) near Geraldton in Western Australia, looks set to become a world champion in this fiercely competitive area of astronomy. The new fast radio burst finding was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

‘Fast radio bursts’ or FRBs are short, sharp spikes of radio waves lasting a few milliseconds. They appear to come from powerful events billions of light-years away but their cause is still a mystery. The first was discovered in 2007 and only 2 dozen have been found since...